1944–1949: (The Centre d’Art and Its Wonders: Peters’s Chauffeur Rigaud Benoît, Yard Boy Castéra Bazile, Hector Hyppolite’s Prophetic Café, and the Stern Bap…

1944–1949: (The Centre d’Art and Its Wonders: Peters’s Chauffeur Rigaud Benoît, Yard Boy Castéra Bazile, Hector Hyppolite’s Prophetic Café, and the Stern Baptist Philomé Obin): Peters’s original plan had been to provide a gathering place for educated artists who still received very little encouragement — he was at first unaware of being surrounded by Haitian Douanier Rousseaus, including his own chauffeur Rigaud Benoît and his yard boy Castéra Bazile, whose Baptism of Christ was destined to become one of Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral’s most celebrated murals. Hector Hyppolite, one of Haiti’s great early painters, first attracted Peters’s attention through his brilliant birds and flowers painted on the walls of a small roadside café prophetically named Ici la Renaissance. Hyppolite, an oungan from St. Marc who had been informed by the lwa of his impending fame, was the first Haitian primitive to achieve international recognition and a one-man show in Paris in 1947 — he died a year later, some say because he neglected the lwa who had bestowed good fortune upon him. Philomé Obin, stern old man of the North and a practicing Baptist, had received some training in art at the local lycée and while working at other trades in his native Cap, continued to record in paint the turbulent history that unfolded before his eyes during almost half a century. Lwa did not speak to Baptists, so Obin manipulated his own destiny — he sent the Centre his magnificently detailed painting of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1934 visit to the Cap and was immediately placed on salary, having heretofore never received more than one dollar for a painting. The story of the Centre d’Art — a California teacher who discovered that his chauffeur was a master painter, that a roadside café sign was the work of a man in communion with the lwa, and that an old Baptist in the Cap had been documenting history in color for decades without an audience — captured the colonial epistemology that Glissant would later theorize as the opacity of Caribbean culture: a creative universe invisible to the metropolitan gaze not because it was hidden but because the categories by which the metropole defined art excluded the very forms in which Caribbean genius expressed itself.